Episode 3: David Baddiel and Gill Hornby
Our guests for this episode are Gill Hornby, author of The Hive and the number one bestseller Miss Austen and David Baddiel, comedian, writer and author, most recently, of Jews Don’t Count. If you would like the read the extracts discussed in this episode go to (substack link). Comments and feedback to @tds153 on Twitter. Line by Line is produced by Ben Tulloh with readings by Deli Segal. Music by Dee Yan-Key.
Extract One
“Her husband’s way of commenting on the strangely impressive objects around them had begun to affect her with a sort of mental shiver: he had perhaps the best intention of acquitting himself worthily, but only of acquitting himself. What was fresh to her mind was worn out to his; and such capacity of thought and feeling as had ever been stimulated in him by the general life of mankind had long shrunk to a sort of dried preparation, a lifeless embalmment of knowledge.
When he said, “Does this interest you, ______? Shall we stay a little longer? I am ready to stay if you wish it,”—it seemed to her as if going or staying were alike dreary. Or, “Should you like to go to the Farnesina, ______? It contains celebrated frescos designed or painted by Raphael, which most persons think it worth while to visit.”
“But do you care about them?” was always her question.
“They are, I believe, highly esteemed. Some of them represent the fable of Cupid and Psyche, which is probably the romantic invention of a literary period, and cannot, I think, be reckoned as a genuine mythical product. But if you like these wall-paintings we can easily drive thither; and you will then, I think, have seen the chief works of Raphael, any of which it were a pity to omit in a visit to Rome. He is the painter who has been held to combine the most complete grace of form with sublimity of expression. Such at least I have gathered to be the opinion of cognoscenti.”
This kind of answer given in a measured official tone, as of a clergyman reading according to the rubric, did not help to justify the glories of the Eternal City, or to give her the hope that if she knew more about them the world would be joyously illuminated for her. There is hardly any contact more depressing to a young ardent creature than that of a mind in which years full of knowledge seem to have issued in a blank absence of interest or sympathy.
Extract Two
‘What are we signing up to when we speak of the “beauty” of this “light”?’ says Dr Belsey, employing quoting fingers. ‘What are these images really concerned with?’
Here Katie sees her opportunity and begins the slow process of thinking about possibly opening her mouth and allowing sound to come from it. Her tongue is at her teeth. But it is the incredible-looking black girl, Victoria, who speaks, and as ever she has a way of monopolizing Dr Belsey’s attention, even when Katie is almost certain that what she is saying is not terribly interesting.
‘It’s a painting of its own interior’, she says very slowly, looking down at her desk and then up again in that stupid, flirty way she has. ‘Its subject is painting itself. It’s a painting about painting. I mean, that’s the desiring force here.’
Dr Belsey raps on his desk in an interested way, as if to say, now we're getting to it. ‘OK,’ he says. ‘Expand.’
But before Victoria can speak again there is an interruption.
‘Umm... I don’t understand how you're using “painting” there? I don’t think you can simply just inscribe the history of painting, or even its logos, in that one word “‘painting’’.”’
The professor seems interested in this point too. It is made by the young man with the T-shirt that says BEING on one side and TIME on the other, a young man Katie fears more than anybody else in this whole university, much more than she could ever fear any woman, even the beautiful black girl, because he is clearly the third most amazing person she has ever come across. His name is Mike.
‘But you've already privileged the term,’ says the professor’s daughter, whom Katie, who is not given easily to hatred, hates. ‘You're already assuming the etching is merely “‘debased painting”. So there’s your problematic, right there.’
And now the class escapes Katie; it streams through her toes as the sea and sand when she stands at the edge of the ocean and dozily, stupidly, allows the tide to draw out and the world to pull away from her so rapidly as to make her dizzy...
Extract Three
Leonard Hartz, a slender and earnest American with a rather comically round head, came to the Constable School because it was one of three British art schools approved by the Veterans Administration under the new, pruned GI Bill. He could not imagine what the VA had seen in the place. Constable—“Connie” to the bird-tongued, red-legged girls who composed half its student body —was at once pedantic and frivolous. The vast university museum which, with a gesture perhaps less motherly than absent-mindedly inclusive, sheltered the school in its left wing, was primarily archaeological in interest. Upstairs, room after room was packed with glass cases of Anglo-Saxon rubble; downstairs, a remarkably complete set of plaster casts taken from classical statuary swarmed down corridors and gestured under high archways in a kind of petrified riot. This counterfeit wealth of statues, many of them still decorated with the seams of the casting process and quite swarthy with dust, was only roughly ordered. Beginning in the East with wasp waisted kouroi whose Asiatic faces wore the first faint smile of the Attic dawn, one passed through the jumbled poignance and grandeur of Greece’s golden age and ended in a neglected, westerly room where some large, coarse monuments of the Roman-Christian degeneracy rested their hypnotized stares in the shadows. Masterpieces lurked like spies in this mob. His first week, Leonard spent a morning and two afternoons sketching a blackened Amazon leaning half clad from a dark corner, and only at the end of the second day, struck by a resemblance between his sketch and the trademark of an American pencil manufacturer, did he realize that his silent companion had been the Venus de Milo.